The Dark Elf Blood Bowl team is one that I’ve achieved great highs with, but also terrible lows. I’ve taken them undefeated to the championship of Orclahoma (the largest single day BB tourney in the US), but have also gone winless and been abused in a league. The lowest low though was simply assembling the new GW plastic team for Blitz Bowl…this squad almost had me quit the hobby again.

Sadly, I don’t have a good picture of the classic 2nd edition models I use to run with. I sold them off a while back, but I do have the image above. It’s hard to tell here, but they are light blue skinned in the classic ‘night elf’ style of the early 80’s and early Blood Bowl editions.

At my table, the true color of proper dark elves.

For team colors, I had them as a tribute to horror-punk band, The Misfits. Pretty much all black, but in this case a single red armoured shoulder pad. I thought they were a cool looking team, but I still opted to move the team on when the game shifted to 32mm. That’s just as well because I wanted another crack at painting them.

Oh, the team name was also a nod with a reference to the song ‘Hatebreeders’, but done in the classic Iron Maiden font. The team name was called out as ‘problematic’ or ‘questionable’ in a podcast, but I don’t think those podcasting had any idea behind the inspiration which has nothing to do with me advocating hate at Blood Bowl tables. Good grief.

Anyway, that was an old edition of the team several years ago…back to the new GW plastic. Even though a Blitz Bowl squad is only 6 models, essentially half of Blood Bowl team, the unnecessary complexity of their assembly has pretty much put me off of the desire to ever rebuild a full squad for Blood Bowl. I used to be impressed with GW’s plastics, but have recently fallen out of love, and this team underscores the reason. 12 parts to assemble one medium sized humanoid? That’s not clever. That’s a bit excessive. Particularly, since this isn’t like the old Mordheim plastics where a sprue of parts allowed one to mix and match parts to create their own mercenaries. This is 12, some very small, bits of plastic for one very specific model build. It reminds me of the complaint I’ve read from modern Lego enthusiasts… too many specialized blocks in recent sets…where’s the generic ones?

I dunno, maybe I’m wrong, or just getting old. Either way this team wasn’t fun to build, but I pushed through. When it came time to putting paint to plastic, I figured I would go with the same red and black color scheme. This time I’d take advantage of the dragon/serpent hide around their necks to more closely match Misfits’ bassist Jerry Only seen in the photo up-post. However, once I put on the skin color around the red (on the left above), I didn’t care for the look too much. On a whim, I went with my favorite blue color, The Fang, and this looked much better I felt (on the right).

Even with the pink introduced as a new color to this team’s scheme, I like how it adds a few streaks of lightness to an otherwise dark kit. Night elf blue also helps break up all the darkness and it was a no-brainer to go with the white transfers. Oh, I manually trimmed down the white tribal tattoo-looking transfers to look less like the art on 90’s dude bros but more like stylized waves. For the Witch Elf this transfer had to go on her hot pants.

The downside to this color scheme is that it’s moved the squad away from it’s Misfits roots. They look more like a synthwave album. I’m also not sure on what team name I should go with. We could revive the Hatebreeders if I change up their logo. I also like the name the Nightrunners, but that might be too close to the DE team the Nightmares. Plus, I also wanna use Nightrunners for a skaven team…and also a Necromantic team. Maybe they’ll all be the Nightrunners. Ha! I dunno.

Well, that’s two of three elf teams done. I guess maybe 2 of four if the High Elves ever make an appearance. I’m on the fence with the Elf Union team. The team that introduced a bit of fluff discombobulation to the game’s setting, but when will the High Elves ever show up? If I do decide to get the Elf Union, I’ll be sure to paint up two elf players of each elven faction. Seems to make sense.